skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is not our position, and I feel it is disingenuous of you to say that.

Every time I’ve seen someone bring up ZKE, you demur or say that most of your customers don’t need it because they are non-technical and their data is not sensitive enough to warrant that level of protection. Every time, you strongly imply that the only people who would need zero-knowledge encryption are criminals. (You’ve just done all of this again here.)

If your position is not what I claimed, and you do think ZKE is something users need, I’d recommend that you spend your engineering budget on implementing it, instead of using that time to do things like rename your Git branches[0].

> Now sometimes people accuse Backblaze of not being a "zero knowledge" backup. What they are saying is that only #4 is "valid" and they really want Backblaze to stop offering #1, #2, or #3.

Could you please give a link to an example of someone actually saying this?

> Security Level 3 - Backblaze Personal Backup with a "custom" unrecoverable private encryption key.

The private key for decryption is automatically generated and sent to Backblaze without any passphrase at install time. It doesn’t get replaced when the passphrase changes, so the original unprotected private key could just be stored and reused later. Setting a passphrase sends it to Backblaze (necessarily, since the private key is only stored on Backblaze servers), so that too could easily be stored (accidentally or intentionally). Restoration requires decryption on Backblaze’s servers, which both requires the passphrase to be sent and also puts all the user’s decrypted data onto persistent storage.

All these design flaws make “Level 3” not meaningfully more secure than “Level 2”. Because of this, it seems to me to exist primarily as a marketing tool, rather than to meaningfully protect users from threat actors. I think we will probably have to agree to disagree on this point.

> Security Level 4 - "Zero Knowledge".

This is not a thing that Backblaze offer. Saying “hey, we have storage, use some third party software to get actually encrypted backups” is no different than me selling some server space and advertising it as “zero knowledge”.

> This is a more secure system, but it is less convenient to restore.

Outside of the issue of forgetting your backup passphrase, there’s nothing more inconvenient about a properly designed zero-knowledge backup. In fact, I would say that the way Backblaze works right now—requiring users to go to a web site to download a zip file, or have a disk sent in the mail—is way more inconvenient than most other backup software which restores directly from the client, including ones with ZKE like Arq and SpiderOak.

[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/code-and-culture-what-happens...
Will do. Thanks for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7l55ZOVIc

But no one likes the alternative, which is to say there is no more alcohol, because it's just another human being saying you can't have more of this that you crave.
It's not "extremism" to strongly dislike a particular technology.
This is a very difficult thing to do. Very impressive. I have so many questions but my number one is: were you able to evaluate alternatives to your existing vertical scaling based setup? For example, cockroachdb, multi-master postgres, using sharding instead of a single DB, etc. At that database size, you are well past the point in which a more advanced DB technology would theoretically help you scale and simplify your architecture, so I'm curious why you didn't go that route.
Thank you for the recommendation. I've ordered a pack of 10 to try - I hope they help.
Democrats have already introduced a new election integrity bill providing funds for secure voting. https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1/te... - Look for “Subtitle F—Promoting Accuracy, Integrity, And Security Through Voter-Verified Permanent Paper Ballot”

Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020. Democrats are perfectly happy to spend even more money to “prove” their wins are real (although it’s actually mostly solid Republican states that use insecure voting machines that don’t have a paper trail and should be forced to upgrade).
I came here to make the same comment. Wow. Super fun!
New campaign targeting security researchers
At around 2:30 you can see some cells moving inside the embryo. What are they doing?
Why is the comment suggesting f-droid killed? So many comments are [dead] on here for no good reason lately. F-Droid seems like a decent idea to me.
> I'd have flagged it already but "voting machines" is vaguely tech related and it's still here.

Agreed.

> It appears you only care what a sizable portion of HN wants up to a point as they are the one's upvoting and downvoting the comments.

Fair point, but in a flame war, HN runs a risk of having a one-sided discussion. Of course, some people believe that the losers in any particular forum should be silenced, because the majority view must be correct.
I've also had the displeasure of having a polyp on my vocal chords. I lost my voice for a few days during an otherwise "normal" cold … and it never really came back. The ability to talk came back, but the ability to sing didn't, not fully. (I could hear, in my voice, that something wasn't right, but beyond that it was hard to describe. Also, I think that was the first & only time I've ever lost my voice. I … didn't really believe people, when they said they'd "lost their voice". I always just sort of assumed they were whispering because their throat hurt, and talking was painful, and they didn't want pain. No! Turns out that losing your voice is a thing!)

I got referred to an ENT pretty quickly. From there … it got a bit bad-healthcare interesting. The first attempt at getting a look at my vocal chords, as I recall, was with a fiber optic scope up the nose. They numb your nose first, and it wasn't painful, but it was beyond uncomfortable, and apparently I nearly blacked out. (And apparently that's common.)

The second attempt was a camera down the throat, and while that was also not great, it got the image of the throat the ENT wanted, and showed the polyp. I wish I had the image; the doctor was not sure how to transfer that to me, so I never got it.

The bill though, was something else. It was like $4k, just to get a look a my throat. Thankfully insurance cut that back considerably, but I instantly paid my deductible for the year. But I can't fathom what actually cost that, unless the camera they stuck down my throat somehow couldn't just be wiped clean & reused.

The surgery to remove the polyp, AIUI at the time, had a prognosis of like a 50% chance of the polyp just coming back. The ENT prescribed some voice exercises, but they were hard to keep up with. So I ended up just taking it easy for a while, and the problem went away. (Though if the article is to be believed, I'd best never run into a vocal specialist in an elevator if I want to keep on thinking that…; but I'm also not a singer.)
My first thought is to wonder how hard it would be to train
You think those are fake links to stanford law on his site? The sources are of equal validity regardless of the messenger.
That is, we trust institutions because we trust that the government has our backs if they screw us.
> If one can improve the lives of the people and make them happier by subverting the law, this is really damning for the government.

People run to below-costs services like cats to catnip. You can make anyone happy by selling them $10 bills for $1. The problem is, what happens when all the competitors are gone, and the reason for below-cost offering ends?

> More importantly, even if you grant the government the authority to take away people's freedom to do things the government considers too risky, purely out of paternalism, the fact is that the government had no reason whatsoever to believe that Uber cabs are less safe

Of course they had, and we grant such authorities all the time. There's a special type of insurance covering commercial transport of people, it's illegal to engage in commercial transport of people without such insurance (and for good reason, if accident happens, then both the driver and the passengers are screwed); the problem, in Uber's case, was too little enforcement, and Uber shielding itself behind "independent contractor" veil and pretending they didn't encourage it.

> the reason traditional taxi companies are unhappy about Uber breaking the laws precisely because the laws help protect their business and extract rent at the expense of the consumers

These laws didn't came out of the blue and weren't just instances of random regulatory capture. The laws creating barriers to entry and (in some places) granting taxi companies limited monopoly are the flip side of the legal requirements that come with the taxi service being treated as a part of public transport infrastructure. Things like the legal requirement for taking passengers in unprofitable locations, or having cars in the fleet adapted for the needs of people with limited mobility. Things Uber did not do, because it didn't have to (and couldn't, really, with their "just a platform" business setup). Instead, Uber offered subsidized rides for able-bodied people in city centres, and no rides at all for elderly or disabled or people living further away.

> Weren't you just a moment ago saying that the drivers were "underpaid"? If it ain't the drivers who are subsidized, then who is, exactly?

The rides were. The prices you paid for a ride were sometimes less than the driver would get from Uber, but Uber wasn't going to pay the drivers more than they needed to (at least not until some follow-up competition came).

> If it's all VC subsidies, they'll run out

That's why Uber is betting so hard on self-driving. They've been operating on a loss for many years now, and they know they can't sustain it.

> and in the meantime, the customers keep benefitting from subsidized rides.

The meantime always ends, eventually. Leaving behind a thoroughly destroyed market. C.f. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/04/03/the-locust-economy/
after considerable negative coverage in the news-media, now the American Journal of Medicine has recommended treatment of 200mgof Hydroxochloroquine per day for Covid-19 patients.

The AJM hasn't recommended anything. AJM has published a paper titled "Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection".

It hasn't published it "now". It has published it back in August of 2020.

According to the abstract, "This article outlines key pathophysiological principles that relate to the patient with early infection treated at home. Therapeutic approaches based on these principles include 1) reduction of reinoculation, 2) combination antiviral therapy, 3) immunomodulation, 4) antiplatelet/antithrombotic therapy, and 5) administration of oxygen, monitoring, and telemedicine".

Discussion of the HQC treatment in the article:

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is an antimalarial/anti-inflammatory drug that impairs endosomal transfer of virions within human cells. HCQ is also a zinc ionophore that conveys zinc intracellularly to block the SARS-CoV-2 RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which is the core enzyme of the virus replication. The currently completed retrospective studies and randomized trials have generally shown these findings: 1) when started late in the hospital course and for short durations of time, antimalarials appear to be ineffective, 2) when started earlier in the hospital course, for progressively longer durations and in outpatients, antimalarials may reduce the progression of disease, prevent hospitalization, and are associated with reduced mortality.

In a retrospective inpatient study of 2541 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, therapy associated with an adjusted reduction in mortality was HCQ alone (hazard ratio [HR] = 0.34, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.25-0.46, P <0.001) and HCQ with azithromycin (HR = 0.29, 95% CI 0.22-0.40, P <0.001).23 HCQ was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1955, has been used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide since then, is sold over the counter in many countries, and has a well-characterized safety profile that should not raise undue alarm. Although asymptomatic QT prolongation is a well-recognized and infrequent (<1%) complication of HCQ, it is possible that in the setting of acute illness symptomatic arrhythmias could develop. Data safety and monitoring boards have not declared safety concerns in any clinical trial published to date. Rare patients with a personal or family history of prolonged QT syndrome and those on additional QT prolonging, contraindicated drugs (eg, dofetilide, sotalol) should be treated with caution and a plan to monitor the QTc in the ambulatory setting. A typical HCQ regimen is 200 mg bid for 5 days and extended to 30 days for continued symptoms. A minimal sufficient dose of HCQ should be used, because in excessive doses the drug can interfere with early immune response to the virus.
Imagine there are 10m users. That's 600kb per user.
I believe it's entirely filesystem agnostic -- if the process running it can read it, all is good.
Every Software Developer is a potential writer
> multiple numbers

At least it's not as wonky as our identity card number. For those who don't know, since our identity cards are emitted by the state governments, instead of the federal government, in theory a single person can have 27 different identity cards, one for each of the 26 states plus the federal district; all of them are valid in the whole country (and beyond, since some Mercosul treaties allow using the identity card instead of the passport).
> I don’t think their argument was particularly strong

The lower court seemed to indicate they were going to win on it before it was dismissed on procedure.

> disenfranchising 6 million voters who voted in good faith per their individual US Constitutional right would never be a sensical remedy for an error in procedure by officials.

The problem is that once the election has been conducted in violation of the law, that has already happened. The total you have is inaccurate and you don't actually know who won, so choosing anyone based on it is disenfranchising anybody who voted for someone else.

Now, I think at one point they were asking to just throw out all of the mail in ballots, which is ridiculous. Some kind of sensible remedy might have been to hold the election again or have the state legislature decide. But then when they started asking for that, people were calling it a coup attempt, as if voting for electors who then vote for President is perfectly democratic and reasonable, but voting for legislators who vote for electors who vote for President according to the constitutional procedure is some kind of seditious tyranny.

And what's the alternative? State officials can violate election procedures with impunity because there is no remedy? Surely you can see how that could be abused for partisan advantage by whoever is in control of the state government.
I wore ortho-k lenses from about 10 years old into my twenties. I switched to daily disposables as I think they are more convenient but when I was younger and playing more sports the ortho-k lenses were great. There is also some evidence that they can prevent eyesight from deteriorating.
HCQ is not recommended by AMJMED.

The linked article is a review and cites four studies on HCQ use in COVID-19 as possible evidence that HCQ when used earlier in the disease course can reduce mortality. The 200 mg/d regimen is called "typical" and falls short of a recommendation.

Multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses (just look here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2021&q=hydroxychlo...) have failed to find evidence of a robust effect of HCQ on mortality or other variables in COVID-19.

Negative media coverage has been earned. HCQ has no place in the treatment of COVID-19.
Thank you for all that detail! A tangential question: At elite levels how well does performance on an ergo translate to on water performance? I rowed reasonably successfully at a junior level and I was much faster in a boat than others that would kick my butt on an ergo. This was always explained away as better technique. I’d be interested to know at a level where everyone has great technique if ergo/boat performance is more consistent.
5.7 TB is small by database standards. I work at a much smaller company and deal with "proportionally" much more data.

I don't know if it would be worth the engineering effort to try and archive old data in a way that still makes it transparently accessible to users that go looking for it--especially when modern databases ought to be able to scale up and out without manual archiving.
There's something called SMILE if you're interested in surgery. I recently had it done.
No, the specifics of how people vote is not publicly available. That is important, in order to prevent voter coercion.
I think the design goal was to never have a decryptable set of the parameters stored with the device.
Did they ever post the post mortem? It doesn't sound like they changed policies that automatically block flags accounts.
Distributed systems are hard. Multi master is particularly sticky, especially if the data doesn't have natural boundaries.

Once solved though horizontal is nice, if more involved to maintain.
To me, chan language is linguistic evolution.

Massively increase the mutation rate, provide instant fitness feedback, and run the simulation for a substantial amount of time.

You're essentially selecting for the most mematic strains on the user population.
Aren't those electrical field patterns still somehow encoded in the DNA?
You also get final results much faster in most cases.

Suppose candidate X beats candidate Y by 20% according to the machine count. You can then pull a randomly selected subset of the paper ballots and count them. You only need to pick a fairly small subset to establish that the 20% machine count is accurate to within a margin of error much smaller than 20%.

This is called a risk-limiting audit.

If X beats Y by 10% according to the machine count, you need to include more paper ballots in your risk0limiting audit.

In general, the closer X and Y are, the more paper ballots need to be in your audit.

If it is close enough, like it was in Georgia, the risk limiting-audit turns into a full hand recount of all the paper ballots.

Most elections, though, aren't that close, and you only need to hand count a relatively small random sample of paper ballots to with very high probability verify that the correct candidate was declared the winner.
> one of those random Japanese words that people pretend have deep philosophical meanings

...you mean, the Japanese terms for philosophical concepts relevant to / embedded in their culture?

this would be like complaining if Japanese people latched onto "amen" as a statement of completion and finality. uh yeah, the concept is applicable across various different cultural configurations
I think that "strategic cooperation" may be a bit of retconning on GPD's part?

I was using a Pocket when Mate first published the images (for the Pocket at the time), and there was no talk about this being in any way official.

That said, in my experience they don't refuse you warranty or anything if your device has a different OS on it, so on that side there is no issue putting an "unofficial" OS on your hardware.
> I know quite a few people that fully believe that voting is effectively a sham now.

Unfortunately this is because they want to believe lies. If they did a small amount of Googling or simply watched a mainstream news source, they’d find that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan all used auditable paper ballots or receipts.

7/8 states that use unverifiable electronic voting machines that don’t have a paper trail went for Trump (e.g. Louisiana). The other is New Jersey, which wasn’t even accused of fraud by Giuliani or Trump.
"The American Journal of Medicine" doesn't, one study published in it does. The title is "Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early
Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)
Infection". It brings no new information regarding Hydroxochloroquine, but instead claims other studies show enough benefits (while not being classical good quality data as usually required) to recommend it in their protocol. Also recommends zinc and azithromycin. Bit of a nothing burger IMO.
And you have to account for indexes, temporary tables used for data analysis, etc. And most of it is probably not compressed. So with that perspective it isn't that much data at all.
How to create your own country
Related:

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24989605
I read this and all I can think about is all that private information on some unmaintained database server.
Good questions. As logical replication matures it may someday be possible to replicate among versions.
True.

The abuses are worse now, distributed rather than institutional, which makes the abuse harder to combat and easier to ignore.

I am not in the USA, and we have a significant problem too.
Not sure if this is included in 'cellular electrical dynamics' but it's still amazing:

Neuronal Signaling and Sodium-Potassium Pump (from PDB-101)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKE8qK9UCrU
What you are suggesting is a one-sided market where prices can only go up and there is no restoring force. That's dumb.

What's worth knowing is that immoral conspiracies among short sellers are incredibly rare. I challenge you to find a documented case. By contrast, there have been many, many pump-and-dump sell-side scams, and without the short side there would be many more.
> What you speak of does exist, it's Medicaid

I can't say that in-patient mental health care (for non-wealthy) is available nowhere in the US. But it is scarce enough that you may have the only example.

I am excluding 72hour-hold facilities because they are more like an extended Dr.s visit, than any sort of rehabilitation.
I think what the world needs more right now is more foundries and not smaller manufacturing processes. The global chip shortage totally sucks and it's because there's so few players and all the innovation is focused on stuff like this instead of figuring out ways to produce ICs faster and cheaper.
> why no court seriously entertained them

The courts didn’t “entertain” them because of standing. Cases weren’t thrown out on merits. No court has actually heard evidence.
Webhooks Delivery SaaS (built by an ex-Stripe)
Thanks for sharing! Is drivers signing that painful ?
I used the wrong word, but it remains that the judges didn't normally rule on the actual arguments of the case, which were ridiculous in their own right.
I'd like to see a video of the hands and feet forming.
I dont know what to say other than my youngest loves it.
I've been skeptical of the AZ vaccine for awhile. I don't know much about biology but I do know statistics. And many of their published results smelled of p-hacking[^1] by cherry-picking the best countries and the best (often accidental!) vaccination regime. Well credentialed people don't actively criticize it because despite those statistical issues, the vaccine is likely still 60-70% effective which is a big deal. But! If the stats side of the house is a clown show, it hurts my confidence in the entire house, especially when BioNTech and Moderna have been great in this respect.

[1]: Perhaps not in the typical sense of "getting a statistically significant result" but in the closely related sense of "getting a larger effect size
Is My MP a Prick?